Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  He took a deep breath, and carefully steadied his hoarse voice. "I'd have rescued you if you were forty and ugly, Opium," he said. "I did that for you, not for me."

  Though she did not move from where she stood, he sensed the lifted readiness of her muscles settle, as if she had drawn back from him a little, and something changed in the shadowy pools of her eyes. "Really?" She could have made the question a seduction, but she didn't. She sounded, if anything, a little taken aback, not truly able to believe that he had not taken her from Zane because he wanted her himself.

  Really? To tell the truth, he wasn't sure he'd have given a damn if the woman Zane wanted to rape had weighed twice what he did, or had had a birthmark the size of a raspberry on her nose.

  Now that WOULD have gotten a laugh out of the men.

  He nodded. "Really," he said, knowing that it was true-or mostly true-now, though it probably hadn't been then. "I'm sorry if you thought different."

  She looked away. Against the dark, he saw only the outline of her nose, small and tip-tilted and perfect, beyond the edge of her cloak hood, but anger and hurt were lambent in the draw of her breath. He felt tongue-tied and vaguely angry himself, at himself, at Starhawk, and at the fate that made him understand what it would cost him to seize this woman and rattle her stupid against the nearest tent. Angry that he knew the cost and couldn't plead ignorance later when faced with the consequences.

  Then the hard line of her shoulders relaxed, the cloak's soft vibration like an echo of an inner defeat. "I'm sorry." She took a deep breath, and looked back at him, for a moment as clumsy, as uncertain as he. The soft redness of her mouth twisted, wry. "Mistress Wyse-our madam, back at the house in Kedwyr-used to say you got what you prayed for. All my life I've hoped there was some man in the world a woman could believe when he said, 'Nobody else.' Just my luck he said it to some other woman." And she turned to go.

  "Opium ... "

  She stopped, turning back, like a bird on the edge of flight as the wind lifted back her cloak from the orange striped silk of her dress, and he saw the question in her eyes. Resolutely ignoring the part of his mind that screamed, Take her fast, you lummox! What are you, gelded? he said, "There's others around-if that's what you really want."

  And she relaxed again and chuckled, warm and lazy and rueful. "If I'd ever been able to figure out what I really want," she said, "I wouldn't have so much trouble." Her smile was soft, and for the first time he saw her not as a beautiful woman he desired, but as a person like himself, skilled in love's arts but not in loving itself. "I'm sorry I was angry at you, that night back at the engineering park. It's just that ... " She hesitated, trying to frame the source of her hurt without sounding conceited, without saying, It was the first time someone had said no.

  "My fault. That was the first time I'd ever pushed anyone away. I'm new at this. I didn't do it very well."

  The teasing light came back into her eyes as she found her footing with him again and her pride. "You'll improve with practice," she said and added with a teasing grin, "If that's what you really want." And turning, she gave him one swing of her hips and faded into the darkness.

  He found himself hoping fervently that the curse would not choose to fall upon her next.

  "Chief?" Part of his mind had already registered Ari's footsteps approaching the tent door at his back. He ducked back under the guy rope, turning his good eye as the young captain's head emerged through the flap. For a moment, seeing the look in Ari's eyes, Sun Wolf felt a throb of bitter resentment-at Ari, at the hex, at Opium, at his ancestors, and at the men and women dying in the tent and at whatever ill tidings Ari was obviously about to impart. In the greasy yellowish glare, his friend looked beaten, worn down by the redoubled weight of command and the ceaseless gnaw of the pain in his arm. He hadn't rolled back the frayed shirtsleeve or jacket over the dressings, which were weathered, despite a dozen washings, to the color of his flesh. In his paranoid moments, the Wolf sometimes suspected him of deliberately doing something to undo his efforts at healing his arm.

  He forced his voice calm. "What is it?"

  "Butcher wants you to have a look at that grut they brought in last night with a fever. He's broken out in boils. Butcher says it looks like plague."

  A few hours before dawn, Starhawk woke, when Sun Wolf crawled frozen and shivering and depleted into her blankets in the pitchy darkness of the crowded tent. The cot was small, but, in this cold, that was an advantage. Even through the clothes they both still wore, his flesh felt icy.

  "You should let them die, you know," she whispered, scarcely louder than the hoarse, nasal breathing all around them in the smelly dark. "You're putting out your strength, your magic, to save their lives, but when you've run out of strength, run out of magic, they're going to die anyway. We're making less than ten miles a day. It's a hell of a long way to Wrynde."

  He whispered, "Shut up," and turned from her, shaking as if with ague himself. She was right, and she sensed that he knew it as well. The magic in him was sunk to an ember, the magic that had called her back to him from the shadowlands of death, the magic that was now the only thing that stood between the troop and disaster. Whoever had placed it, whyever and however it had been placed, the curse was eating it and him alive.

  This was wizardry. This was what he'd traded the troop for, his friends for, and his former life for.

  She had nothing to give him but her touch, feeling the coarse hair on his back through the threadbare linen shirt. He turned, suddenly and convulsively, and caught her in his arms, holding her desperately, his head buried in her breast.

  They reached Wrynde eight days later; in those eight days, they lost nearly a hundred men to the plague. Sun Wolf-bludgeoned, aching, physically and emotionally drained-had long since ceased to speculate on who might have placed the curse upon the troop or what it was in the camp that was marked; it was enough to work the healing-magic, to weave the weather, to drag and lever straining wagon teams out of mudholes and to fill in as Ari's second-in-command on the day-to-day business of the train. When Butcher was taken with the plague five days out of Wrynde, he took over the running of the hospital as well, assisted by Big Nin, the madam who'd stayed with Ari's half of the troop, and by Moggin, whose copious readings in Drosis' medical books had given him at least a theoretical knowledge of what he was supposed to be doing.

  As commander, he had understood that his life was forfeit for his followers when he led them into battle. This slow bleeding away of his strength, of his time, and of his spirit was something different. It was responsibility without glory, and he ceased even to hate it, knowing it only as something which had to be done and which only he, as a wizard, could do. He began to perceive that the curse would destroy them.

  They reached Wrynde in the rain, a vast, crumbling corpse of a town whose scattered limbs of walls, churches, and villas had long since, like a leper's, dropped off from lack of circulation and sunk rotting back into the broken landscape of flint-colored stream cuts, granite, and marsh. On the high ground between the cold silver becks that now webbed the remains of the city stood the village, sturdily walled against bandits and offering protection to the farmers, small merchants, and mule breeders who were able to eke a living from what had once been the fertile heartland of the north. A small delegation of them met the train, led by Xanchus, mayor of the town and breeder of most of the troop's stock, to inform them that most of the population of the town had been laid low by a debilitating flux. By this time, Sun Wolf and Ari scarcely cared.

  They camped in the ruins of an old convent outside Wrynde's walls and, the following day, labored the last ten miles to the old garrison-citadel which had once defended the town and its mines, perched like a sullen and crusted dragon on its heather-bristling hillside-the Camp. Home!

  Sun Wolf crawled to the three-room wooden house that had been his for years, feeling like a very old dog dragging itself into a swamp to die. He slept like a dead man for over twelve hours. When he was wakened by shouts
and cries and informed that the camp had caught fire, all he could do was sit on the brick steps of the terrace and laugh until he cried.

  The damage wasn't severe, owing to the thoroughness with which everything had been soaked by the rain. But returning, sodden with exhaustion, to stir up the hearth fire in the iron-black hour between moonset and first light, he had a sense of dejd vu, of having come full circle from the bitter dawn in the house of the innkeeper's sister, on the slopes of the Dragon's Backbone, hundreds of miles to the south.

  On the white sand of the hearth, raised within an open square of brick benches, the fire wickered softly. He could hear Starhawk's light tread on the wooden steps that led down into the overgrown garden where the bathhouse was. Cold as the night had been, the first thing she'd done after the flames in the stables and hospital were quenched had been to heat water for a bath. A moment later he heard the heavy cedar door close, and the creak of the oak floor as she crossed at a respectful distance behind him, in case he was asleep.

  He turned his head to glance at her as she folded herself down neatly cross-legged on the hearth at his side.

  "Here." She tossed him something silver, which landed with a bright, cold clatter on the bricks. "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good-I remember thinking that some time ago."

  "What is it?" He looked down. A stratus-weight silver piece lay beside him.

  "Dogbreath and I had a bet on about what would happen next. I bet on a fire."

  "I always knew you were a coldhearted bitch."

  Moggin's quiet tread murmured on the smooth planking from the direction of the tiny lean-to kitchen. "Thank your esteemed ancestors Dogbreath didn't win. I believe his money was on a blizzard." He almost fell onto the brick bench, gray-lipped with shock and exhaustion, and held out chapped and wasted hands to the warmth of the flames. "One can, at least, put out a fire."

  "Good," grumbled Sun Wolf dourly. "We've got something to look forward to tomorrow."

  In the rough jumble of furs and padded silk quilts from K'Chin that covered their pine-pole bed that night, he dreamed of Opium. He saw her as he'd seen her first, moving through the harlequin shadows of the burned siege tower with her hands full of the rustling bitter-sweetness of hellebore, the golden chain of slavery winking on her throat and her cloak parting to show the blood-crimson silk of the gown that had been her man's last present to her. He saw the Lady Prince like a fever-dream orchid in daffodil sarcenet and pearls, laughing as she held out her crystal vinaigrette to him, and behind her like a shadow, a sloe-eyed woman with long black hair, a woman they had said was a witch ...

  Then Starhawk woke him, and he returned to the hospital in the sodden dawn, to kneel in the wet drafts whistling through the canvas patches on the charred walls, digging the last vestiges of magic from the marrow of his bones to help the dying.

  And hating it.

  The rain poured down like a misdirected river, dripping steadily through the tenting that patched the roof. Sun Wolf's hands shook with weariness as he traced the runes of healing upon mortifying flesh, his mind reducing the constellations of power to gibberish with endless repetition. He wondered why he had ever thought becoming a wizard was anything he wanted to do, and wished that everyone in the hospital would die so he could go back to his house and sleep.

  Near sunset, he stumbled out, starving, sick, and lightheaded with fatigue. For a time, he hadn't even the energy to stumble down the plank steps to the morass of the camp's wide central square. He could only stand in the gloom of the sheltered colonnade that fronted the length of the hospital, staring numbly out into the damp grayness of the afternoon.

  Across the square, Ari's long brick house, formerly the quarters of the garrison governor and adorned with a colonnade of broken and obscenely defaced caryatids, was dark. Raven Girl lay in the low-roofed cave of the hospital ward behind him, blistered lips muttering feverish words. To his left, the tall, square bulk of the Armory tower reared itself against the dove-colored sky, surrounded by its confusion of galleries, stone huts, lofts, and walls, with the great, slant-roofed training floor and Hog's forge half-seen at its rear. Under the faint whisper of misting rain, it looked half-ruinous, decaying, like the ruins that surrounded Wrynde, like the scattered stone villas, chapels, and old mine works that dotted the countryside near the ancient town, or like the world itself, coming to pieces under the pressure of cold and war, schism, and decay.

  He leaned his head against a pillar. Some wizard you are, he thought bitterly. He had put forth all his strength, all his magic, to save Firecat's life as he had saved Starhawk's weeks ago, as he had been able to save others', and ten minutes ago Firecat had died under his hands. They were already dividing up her weapons, her armor, and the garish jewels she had worn into battle. He'd have to tell Starhawk, when she came off guard duty on the walls.

  Whoever wanted them destroyed was going to succeed, in spite of all he could do.

  Across the court Ari emerged from the shadows beneath the defaced carving of the lintel, looking worse than many of the patients Sun Wolf had just attended. His arm was still bandaged, the wound still unhealed. Penpusher followed him, cadaverous in his ruinous black suit, and beside him walked Xanchus the Mayor, a fussy, middle-aged man in a long green mantle trimmed with squirrel fur who, in spite of a poor harvest, hadn't managed to lose his paunch. Xanchus' voice floated fruitily in the bitter air: " ... may have all the spears, Captain, but you'd be in sorry shape without our mules, our farms ... " A stray snatch of wind carried the rest of his words away, but Sun Wolf knew that the next ones were going to be: " ... our forges and our brew houses ... " He'd heard the whole speech before, times without counting, when he had commanded the troop.

  A flash of red caught his eye and a flash of gold. Turning his head he saw Opium crossing the court, the same skiff of wind tossing wide the darkness of her cloak to reveal the crimson silk. Walking beside her, Big Nin was wearing a gown of the identical daffodil sarcenet the Lady Prince had worn. The madam's dress was cut narrower, partly to show off the delicacy of her shape and partly because anything that color was literally worth its weight in gold. But, Sun Wolf, supposed, if one owned ...

  And his thought paused, like a rising bird pinned suddenly through with an arrow.

  Shutters covered the latticed parchment in most of the windows of his house. In the queer brown dimness, the books of the Witches seemed to glow a little, as they sometimes did with the bluish psychic miasma of what they contained. From the little wash-leather bag beside them, Sun Wolf took the phial containing what little was left of the auligar powder. He dipped his fingertips in it and crossed to the hearth.

  The coin Starhawk had flipped to him last night still lay on the warmed bricks. He picked it up and rubbed it gently, glad that the powder itself held magic; in his exhaustion, even the tiny effort of a simple spell was agony.

  The Eye was written on the coin.

  He fished in his jerkin pocket and found another stratus-weight silver piece, part of the Vorsal front money he'd picked up in one of those rare poker games in which more than a few coppers had changed hands. Faint and greenish, the mark glowed to life across the emblem of the Pierced Heart.

  Standing like a statue beside the banked embers of the sleeping hearth, he felt the rage rise through him like the heat of brandy. If it had been revenge, he thought, in some calm corner of his heart, I would understand. If it had been to keep from happening what did happen-Moggin's wife and daughters raped and murdered, the city sacked and burned-by my ancestors, I wouldn't hold it against them.

  But it wasn't. Part of him was so angry he was shaking, but in his heart lay the cold burn of icy fury, fury that kills calmly and does not feel. Very quietly he put on his ragged mantle again, pulled its hood up over his damp and straggly hair. From behind the door he took a pole arm, seven feet long and tipped with a spear blade and crescent guards, and stepped out once more into the rain.

  He found what he sought very quickly. He'd always known the place wa
s there. They all had: a grubby and sodden complex of pits, trenches, mine shafts and subsidences a few miles due north of Wrynde, among which the stone foundations of sheds and furnaces could still be traced. The rain had eased; clouds lay over the tops of the rolling purple-brown swells of the land like rancid milk. Cold bit Sun Wolf's face as he left his horse tied, picking his way afoot among the crumbled reefs of broken rock at the bottom of the pit-shaped depression to poke in the corners of what had once been sheds with the end of the pole arm, listening behind him, wary and half expecting at any moment the djerkas to make its appearance again.

  He only found what he sought because he knew what to look for. Beside the round, sunken pit of what had been a brick-walled kiln was a pile of rock chips, with which he could gouge the brick and even some of the sandstone of the foundation walls. In what had been another shed, after a bit of searching, he found buried under years' worth of mold and filth a few whitish lumps of calcined substance which, smashed open with a lump of granite, left a faint, bitter-sweet taste on his dampened finger.

  "Bastard," he whispered, more angry than he remembered ever being in his life. "Stinking, codless, murdering bastard."

  Behind him, on the other side of the dell, his horse flung up its head with a warning shriek.